


A Hell of a Lot of Luck

by Wolf_of_Lilacs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Kinda Cracky, M/M, mostly pre-slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 11:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18659638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolf_of_Lilacs/pseuds/Wolf_of_Lilacs
Summary: During their first year encounter, Voldemort curses Harry so that he can only die by Voldemort's hand. This  powerful curse has an unexpected side-effect. Every time Harry is in a life-or-death situation, Voldemort is now compelled by the curse to save him even to the point of risking his own life.





	A Hell of a Lot of Luck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CeNedraRiva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CeNedraRiva/gifts).



> Fill for an amazing prompt by CenedraRiva.
> 
> My knowledge of Latin grammar is nonexistent, so I hope the name of the curse doesn't break about five thousand rules.

Harry's scar hurt worse than ever as he passed through the dark fire to the cavernous chamber on the other side. Danger, he had thought, terrible danger. But all there was was Professor Quirrell, examining a mirror.

"About time, boy." Immediately Harry was bound tightly from shoulder to ankle, unable to move. "It's you," he stammered. "Not Snape."

"No, not Severus. Goodness, you do expect much of him." Quirrell turned back to the mirror.

"Wait."

A second voice, Harry noted, his terror peaking. Not Quirrell's. Higher. Colder. Strained.

"M-Master?" Quirrell slumped. "I don't think you are strong enough—"

"I am strong enough for this. Go back to the boy."

"Y-yes." Quirrell left the mirror, unwinding his turban as he approached.

"I will not have you dying from others' incompetence or your own impulsivity, Harry Potter," said the face that was inexplicably on the back of Quirrell's head. "Your death is mine, boy."

The pain in Harry's scar was so severe that his vision was blurry, but he knew who this was. Who else could it be? "Voldemort?"

"You dare speak my name?" Voldemort raised one of Quirrell's hands and smiled. " _Vestra Anima_ …” Harry thought he said, or something like that. 

The room shook with the power of whatever Voldemort had cast. Quirrell crumpled to the floor. Voldemort laughed, wild and triumphant and so very weak. Harry felt a shift, it seemed, somewhere in his magic, in his soul.

"It is done," Voldemort rasped. "The stone remains out of reach, for now." If he had teeth—was more than a bodiless wraith—he would have gnashed them. "Farewell, Harry Potter. We will meet again. If not for Quirrell's weakness, I would kill you now. Alas..." The pain in Harry's scar rose once more as Voldemort seemed to edge away, out of Quirrell's body, into the room at large. Harry fainted.

*

"Did you hear any of the words he spoke?" Dumbledore asked. His voice was kind, but Harry could sense the urgency just under the surface.

"I don’t know," he said. "It sounded like Latin, I don't know."

"And then afterward? How did you feel?"

"Strange and almost the same." Harry was tired. He'd been asleep for three days, Dumbledore had said. Fifteen minutes was not enough time to fully wake.

Dumbledore sighed. "Goodness." He looked over the sweets on Harry's bedside table with a contemplative frown. "Perhaps some of these will do us both some good."

"Yeah." Harry picked a chocolate frog, unwrapping it to find Herbo the Fowl's card. "One of the worst dark wizards ever recorded. Pushed dark magic to heights it had never reached before."

"That's right." Dumbledore selected a Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean, then gagged. "Alas, earwax. Herbo the Foul was the worst dark wizard for centuries, until Voldemort himself came along. Try not to dwell on the curse too much, Harry."

Dumbledore meant well, Harry hoped, but nothing of their conversation was reassuring.

*

Many things out of the ordinary )what was ordinary, anyway?) happened during Harry's second year.

During the first Quidditch match, a bludger kept to Harry obsessively, nearly causing him to fall off his broom. It was not enough to stop him from catching the Snitch. But, somehow, that was only the half of it. Harry could only describe what he felt in the moments afterward, while Lockhart brandished his wand and succeeded in deboning Harry's broken arm, as a deep scrutiny and a faint smarting in his scar. He would have told Dumbledore, but Colin’s Petrification that evening and rather put it out of Harry's mind.

It all culminated in the Chamber of Secrets.

"Dumbledore said help will always come to those who ask for it," Harry said with bravado he didn't feel to the shade of Tom Riddle, who laughed in derision.

"Oh, adorable. _Kill him_." The basilisk charged. And Harry's scar exploded in pain. He was going to die, and Voldemort was here, just like last year…

"No!" The basilisk halted, then turned away from Harry entirely, diving at Ginny instead.

"What are you doing?" Riddle screeched. "The girl is irrelevant. Kill the boy!"

It was at that precise moment that Fawkes appeared in a flash of fire with the Sorting Hat in his talons. He looked about, his beady black eyes narrowed. The basilisk was not concerned with Ginny. It took the diary in its mouth. Riddle cried out in shock. "No! No, you idiot. The boy, not—" His words melted into screaming once more. Fawkes landed on Harry's shoulder, and the two of them looked on in confusion.

When Riddle ceased screaming, he vanished. The basilisk let the diary fall back to the chamber's floor. "Potter," it spat. "See what you've brought me to?"

"I don't know what you—" This was not the basilisk. He knew it as surely as he could see that Ginny was waking up.

"Take that with you when you go," the Basilisk hissed, pushing the diary across to Harry. "Or perhaps…" It considered. "Yes, take it. Let him think what he will. I was never here."

"But—" Harry protested.

"Hush, and may we not meet anytime soon, boy. Don't do anything else stupid and brave, please." The basilisk sounded weary.

When the boy had taken the girl away and flown off clutching the phoenix's talons, Voldemort left the basilisk with a rueful sigh-not-sigh (whatever the hell he could manage as a wraith). He couldn't stay here, either way. He should have made the basilisk eat the diary. Now, now there was evidence. Dumbledore would find them, and he could do nothing but hope Harry Potter didn't kill him out of pure bad luck.

When Harry was faced with dementors at his first Quidditch match during third year and fell off his broom, he remembered a faint twinge in his scar and a slight cushioning. He was told afterword that Dumbledore had cast a spell to slow his fall, but that didn't seem quite right.

"He did, Harry. We all saw it," Ron assured him.

"Do you need more potions, Harry?" Hermione asked. "Madam Pomfrey's obviously willing."

Harry shuddered at the thought.

Scabbers disappeared just after Christmas. Everyone assumed he was dead, given the rather large amount of blood on Ron's sheets. Ron blamed Crookshanks, Hermione’s friendly, adventurous ginger cat. Harry, though, wondered.

He'd had a rather strange dream one night, wherein he was scurrying beneath doors and into the cracks of walls and finally, finally, out into open air.

_"I don't have a wand," he said._

_"You what?" another voice responded, incredulous. "I went through all of that, and you don't have a wand?"_

_"No, master."_

Harry woke up then, his scar hurting rather a lot. That voice…It had sounded like Voldemort's, but how?

The night Buckbeak was executed—and then saved through Hermione's timely time travel gig—Peter Pettigrew was nowhere to be found, and Sirius Black's innocence could not be proven. The dementors nearly Kissed Harry, Hermione, and Sirius as they lay helpless by the lake, and at that moment, something changed. Peter Pettigrew appeared on the grounds (Harry knew this only because of Sirius’s angry muttering at something he couldn’t see, but Harry felt more pain…and then fainted). Pettigrew was almost captured by several confused Aurors. When they went back in time, Harry and Hermione still couldn't fix this. And Sirius escaped on the back of the hippogriff, as it seemed he was fated to do.

Harry got captured at the Quidditch World Cup, during the chaos of the Death Eaters' masked demonstration. A hand grasped him around the throat as he stumbled through the trees, a gag was pressed into his mouth, and he was squeezed through suffocating darkness. When the darkness lifted, he was in what he took to be a graveyard. He tried to struggle free from whoever had accosted him, but it was useless. He was tied to a gravestone.

There was a cauldron. There was a thing the size of a baby wrapped in a pile of robes. "Harry," it hissed, before it was submerged in a bubbling potion. "Look around you well, for this is the last night I will ever have to deal with you."

Harry kicked fruitlessly and didn't reply. And the rest preceded according to a dreadful plan. Bone, flesh, and blood, all combined to give Lord Voldemort a body to be, perhaps, proud of.

"And now, Harry," Voldemort said, stepping from the cauldron and wrapping a robe the rat handed to him about himself, suddenly terribly concerned about his modesty (for he had a body to be modest about, how strange), "it is time for my curse to prove its…worth." He grimaced. "Honestly the number of times I've had to save you from stupid—forgive me, Harry, but the mad Bludger incident was not one of your proudest near-deaths—"

"I didn't choose for that to happen!" Harry protested. "That was Dobby!"

“—That said, it is finally time for me to end this misery which you have put me through." Voldemort raised his wand (the retrieval of which was quite the tale of its own) and grinning evilly, his waxy features warped into a horrific mask by the tautness of his smile, his scarlet eyes sparking in the near-darkness.

"But if you kill me," Harry said, "then where will you find your fun?" He didn't have much to lose, anyway. He could say whatever he wanted.

Voldemort positively glowered. He swished his wand savagely, and Harry's ropes fell away. "Give him back his wand, Wormtail. I shall duel him for his impertinence. He does not deserve the mercy I was willing to grant him."

They cast at the same time. Their wands connected in a brilliant beam of gold. Harry didn't have a ready Portkey, but he did have a hell of a lot of luck. He made a break for it, ran to the nearest Muggle town, summoned the Knight Bus, and ended up back at the Burrow. All in an evening's work.

"Wait. You said You-Know-Who is back?" Ron asked, for the hundredth time.

"Yes, Ron. He's back, and he's bloody terrifying." Harry remembered 

Harry did not participate in the Triwizard Tournament, of course. Voldemort had what he needed from him already. No one except Dumbledore believed Harry that he was back, and the Tournament went on.

*

"Wormtail," Voldemort sighed. "If that boy gets into any life-threatening situations, we are, for want of a less crude term, completely fucked."

"Why?" Wormtail wondered.

"Never mind that."

*

Harry didn't participate in the Tournament, but was nearly gored when one of the dragons broke from its enclosure. His scar hurt more than he did, and he saw• or felt...

"No no goddammit no stupid boy no..." Resisting the curse hurt more now that he had a body to feel proper pain.

Several months later, when Death Eaters of all stripes were broken out of Azkaban, they were given one order. "Whatever you do, do not try to kill Harry Potter. His death is mine."

"What if we find him? Can we capture him?" Bella leaned forward, manic gleam in her eyes, fingers twitching.

"Of course. But you won't have the chance, I expect. He is too well protected. Though not well enough to avoid—" Voldemort bit the rest of his sentence off and massaged his forehead. A headache was constant above his right eye, and he wasn’t sure if it was his own exhaustion or the boy's. Damn him a hundred times over. Nagini couldn't even kill him, as the diary’s failed attempt suggested. Only Voldemort himself.

*

"You moron, Dudley," Harry said, as Dudley knocked his wand from his hand. The alley was dark as the dementors came ever closer. And, naturally, it was at this point that Harry's scar began hurting, and someone swore behind him.

"Dementors, really? How the devil, boy?"

Well, Harry was more amused than anything. " _Expecto Patronum_!" he tried, and the stag leapt immediately from his wand. As the dementors fled, he caught sight of Voldemort, standing stock-still, his mouth slightly open at the sight. Harry knew he should have been petrified, but—

"Yeah, everyone's impressed by that," he said. "Don't know why. I had to learn it. I'm not trying to show off."

Voldemort's attention turned from the vanishing stag to Harry, and he seemed once again surprised, almost wary, like he was seeing a ghost. "Who do you live with during the summers, Harry?"

"Oh, my aunt and uncle," Harry said. He thought everyone knew that.

"I wonder." Voldemort leapt at him, grasping him about the wrist and spinning on the spot. Voldemort vanished, but Harry was left behind.

Voldemort reappeared a second later, immensely annoyed. "I cannot take you from here. I expect I cannot harm you here at all." He sighed. "Later, then, boy. Your days are numbered."

"Like I didn't know that already," Harry muttered as Voldemort Disapparated again.

Harry's dreams during his fifth year were strange, more so than usual. There was much pacing, much contemplating, much…

Voldemort had seen himself as he had once been, underfed and dressed in hand-me-down clothes, and he could not forget it. What was it, then, that made Harry Potter so different? And why did death stalk him so eagerly? Was it power? Was it that he was his prophesied foe? What?

Voldemort would know, before he killed him, if the boy's terrible luck didn't kill him first. _Damn you, Harry Potter._

The prophecy was successfully retrieved (a quick Imperius and a late night stroll), and Voldemort smashed it himself when it confirmed his worst fears. _Neither can live while the other survives_. Dear Lord. If the boy just let him kill him, things would be so much simpler.

*

During Harry’s sixth year, the life-threatening events did not touch him quite enough to activate the curse (except for a brief moment in a seaside cave, that Voldemort passed off as a fluke and successfully ignored). He and Voldemort had no cause to meet. There were no shared dreams, very little shared emotion.

It was…all rather strange.

And as Harry, Ron, and Hermione hared across the countryside searching for errant Horcruxes, Voldemort could only set his traps and wait.

And wait.

And wait until a terrible night at the beginning of May when he came to understand how truly fucked he was, and then attacked Hogwarts to deal with it.

*

"Give me Harry Potter, and you shall all be spared." Harry snorted. Right. That would never happen. And so the battle went, with the destruction of more Horcruxes and the death of Fred.

The Shrieking Shack, and Snape’s memories dripping into a conjured flask.

"I have to die, then," Harry said to himself as he emerged from the Pensieve. The empty portraits did not respond. "That's all he's ever wanted, and I'm just going to…to give it to him."

And in the forest, where Voldemort waited, alone, for he would not share this moment, not when it has been so long denied. "This is too easy," Voldemort murmured as he raised his wand to kill the nuisance in front of him. "All the times I have saved you, and it comes to this."

Harry stood quietly.

"What will happen, I wonder, when the deed is done?" Voldemort asked no one in particular.

"Only one way to find out," Harry muttered.

"Right you are, Harry." And he cast the curse.

Of course, Harry survived. But _Vestra Anima_ was broken now, and all should have been right. Nothing would go differently here, except for one thing. Even Voldemort had some amount of sentimentality. Some would say that was unlikely, that sentimentality was foreign, impossible for him. But with the curse came yet another side effect he had not predicted: a bond of something far deeper than soul, and he daren’t put a name to it.

"Any could kill you!" he realized as the shock of Harry’s survival began to wear off. He grasped Harry by the wrist, to what end, neither of them knew.

"I don't think I can die while you live," Harry said, backing away from Voldemort's demonstrative enthusiasm.

"No, no. We cannot risk it. I should cast it again!"

"Er, and then what?" Harry asked. "you try and fail to kill me again?"

"Something like that. But what do you say? The curse has served you rather well." Voldemort raised a nonexistent eyebrow hopefully.

"Er, I guess."

Voldemort gestured wildly. "Although it killed Quirrell when I cast it before. I don't have him to take the brunt of it now."

"Or any horcruxes," Harry said.

"Yes, how could I have forgotten?" Voldemort snarled.

"You know I can't let you win," Harry said. "No matter how much you've _unwillingly_ done for me."

"Then we must duel," Voldemort said. "For all to see."

*

The duel went on and on. What Harry lacked in knowledge he made up for in instinct. Footwork and spells, dodging was still nothing to turn one's nose (or former nose) up at; a hilarious stream of taunts volleyed back and forth. Hell, it was fun. Best duel Harry'd ever had. Especially when Voldemort's wand wouldn't fight him and ended up in Harry's hand.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Voldemort sighed. "I fucking surrender." Which was utterly false, and he immediately made a break for it, flying through one of the Great Hall’s shattered windows without a backward glance.

Ah well. The war was won, with most of the Death Eaters captured or dead. There was a warrant out, a several thousand Galleon bounty on Voldemort's head, etc.

Harry tried to live his life. Free of any curses or arrant bits of someone else's soul. But it wasn't easy, for Voldemort had always been such a part of his existence. Tragedy though he was.

*

"You seem lonely, Harry Potter." Two years after the war, and Harry was walking aimlessly through the Forbidden Forest. It carried too many memories, and was thus a good place to mope.

"Aren't you afraid someone will catch you here?" Harry said.

"No. They will only see me if I wish to be seen." Voldemort slid from behind a tree, several twigs sticking from his high-collared black robes. If he'd still had hair, Harry thought, it would have been a tangled mess. Instead, his smooth, bald head caught the half-light rather…well…

Harry didn’t mind the aesthetic.

He felt the blood rush to his face, and squeezed his eyes shut.

"You wanted me to find you here. I'm an Auror trainee now. I could turn you in." Which would only result in more fame and headaches and Galleons he didn’t need.

"But you won't." Voldemort was smug. "That isn't your way. The Chosen One makes his own path, hmm? Is an Auroror what you truly wish to be?"

"No," Harry replied. "But I don't want to teach at Hogwarts until my students _aren't_ practically my age."

"That never bothered me," Voldemort mused. "The opportunities far outweighed anything else.”

“Right. Well, that’s you.”

“You could be so much more than an Auror, Harry,” Voldemort went on, gesturing expansively in his earnestness. “You survived me, after all.”

“Um, thanks,” Harry hedged.

“Few have,” Voldemort went on. “Especially not after multiple Killing Curses. And fewer still are…”

“Are what?” Harry was fascinated by Voldemort’s apparent loss for words, despite himself.

“Never you mind.” Voldemort smiled and Harry was caught up in it. “If you quit the Aurors, Harry, I will teach you whatever magic you want to know. And then, when the time is right, I suppose you could teach, as you wish.”

It was an outrageous offer. Harry should have refused it without a second thought but—

(He missed the rapport they’d had.)

“Okay,” Harry said.

They shook on it. Voldemort’s palm was cool and dry, and Harry enjoyed… (Goddammit, no, he thought.)

“I’ll see you around, Harry Potter,” Voldemort said, faintly triumphant. “You have a lot to learn.” 

“I can’t wait,” Harry replied, and meant it.


End file.
